Jul 10, 2020 - Politics & Policy

TikTok users troll Trump campaign's official app

Screenshot: Apple App Store

TikTok users have again tried to prank President Trump, flooding his official campaign app with thousands of one-star reviews, Bloomberg eports.

Why it matters: Generation Z is retaliating against the president after his administration has floated banning the Chinese-owned app — a favorite among their cohort — in recent days over data privacy concerns, which TikTok denies.

  • The backdrop, via Axios' Sara Fischer: This species of prank — organizing online multitudes to swamp surveys and signups — is as old as the internet itself. But right-wingers have often been behind many such pranks.

The app now has an overall rating of 1.2 stars — and more than 103,000 one-star reviews.

  • "TikTok users don’t affect anything we do. What we do know is that the Chinese use TikTok to spy on its users," Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh said.

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Dion Rabouin, author of Markets
Oct 8, 2020 - Economy & Business

Robinhooders aren't who you think they are

Reproduced from CivicScience; Chart: Axios Visuals (Note: percentages are rounded and may add to more than 100)

Trading platform Robinhood is growing — up to 10 million users — and is not just made up of wet-behind-the-ears gamblers and sports bettors, a new survey from CivicScience shows.

  • More than half of Robinhood users describe themselves as either long-term or 401(k) investors.

What it means: Retail traders broadly have been looked at with skepticism and scorn by much of the investment community, and Robinhood users, especially, are seen as capricious and naively bidding up trend stocks. However, the data show most of the platform's users aren't active traders.

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Axios
Updated 1 min ago - Politics & Policy

Coronavirus dashboard

Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios

  1. Politics: Obama: Trump is "jealous of COVID's media coverage" — Axios-Ipsos poll: Federal response has only gotten worse.
  2. Health: Hospitals face a crush — 13 states set single-day case records last week.
  3. Business: Winter threat spurs new surge of startup activity.
  4. Media: Pandemic causes TV providers to lose the most subscribers ever.
  5. States: Nearly two dozen Minnesota cases traced to three Trump campaign events.
  6. World: Putin mandates face masks.
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Rebecca Falconer, Laurin-Whitney Gottbrath
Updated 55 mins ago - Science

Louisiana braces for 3rd hurricane in 2 months as Tropical Storm Zeta nears

Municipality workers clean the streets of garbage in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, on Tuesday that was left by Zeta, which struck the Yucatan Peninsula as a Category 1 Hurricane a day earlier — causing no major damage to infrastructure. Photo: Medios y Media/Getty Images

Tropical Storm Zeta is expected to strengthen back into a hurricane and bring dangerous storm surge conditions to parts of the northern Gulf Coast on Wednesday, per the National Hurricane Center.

The state of play: Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards (D) requested a pre-landfall Federal Declaration of Emergency in a letter to President Trump on Tuesday, ahead of the storm's expected arrival south of New Orleans.

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